key element here is motive. Once we figure that out, it will help us to connect the victims. I’m convinced there is a link—we just haven’t seen it yet.”
“Maybe the killer is the only link,” Butts suggested.
“Is there any chance the choice of victims was random?” Chuck asked.
Lee shook his head. “Highly unlikely. The notes all suggest a relationship of some kind—at least in the killer’s mind.”
“Okay, then we need to set up more interviews with people who knew the vics,” Chuck said. “Detective Butts has done a few already, but I’m thinking we need to cast a wider net.”
Lee nodded in agreement, but what he was thinking was that nets have holes, and their prey had already proven slippery enough to evade them so far. He was beginning to wonder if there was a net in the world big enough to catch him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Lee arrived home, there was a message on his answering machine, and it wasn’t entirely welcome. It was from Kay Shackleton, the head of the Psychology Department at John Jay College, asking him if he was interested in being a guest lecturer at the college. He sank down in the red leather armchair by the window and listened to the message a second time.
“We’ve been working on the list of visiting professors, and Tom thought of asking you,” she said. Tom Mariella was a senior professor on the faculty and an excellent teacher—Lee had taken several of his courses.
“… your position on the police force gives you a unique point of view, and we thought you might be interested in giving your perspective on the attack on the World Trade Center. It would be part of a series of lectures given by other faculty members as well. With the anniversary coming up, we just thought—” Lee hit the STOP button on the machine.
He had read somewhere—R. D. Laing, perhaps—that the primary emotion experienced by people in the presence of evil was confusion. He felt that now—as he did with every case he worked on. It was a familiar feeling, and yet one he never seemed to get used to … underneath the cold, hard fact of three dead victims lurked a whirlpool of bewilderment. Spuyten Duyvil … Whirlpool of the Devil.
He wandered into the kitchen and made himself a martini, shaking it in the sterling-silver decanter that once belonged to his father. He poured it into a V-shaped glass, added an olive, and took a swallow. The taste of gin was reassuring—sharp, medicinal, like drinking pine sap. He drank some more and wandered into the living room.
The anniversary is coming up…. He had lived through more than enough anniversaries already—his father’s desertion, his sister’s disappearance—and now this. His profession was about solving things, the puzzles and mysteries behind crime, and yet he could not solve the mysteries in his own heart. The questions gnawed at him, and they all seemed connected. How could his father have left his family behind, just walking out the door one rainy night, never to return? And how could his sister have disappeared without a trace, as though she had never existed? And how could someone slip through the crowded streets of the city, carrying the knowledge that he was a murderer, yet not betray that dark fact to anyone he met—until it was too late?
Dusk settled uneasily over Manhattan as Lee stared out his front window, martini in hand. The rays of the setting sun fell on the Ukrainian church across the street, caught in the vast circular design of the stained-glass window that took up most of the church’s front façade. He imagined the light traveling forever in the circular whirl of saints and visions, caught in an endless trajectory of faith and belief. He was reminded that many of the stars whose distant light we see on clear nights are already dead, and that what we see is just the trail of ghosts, left behind long after their lives have ended.
Laura’s trail still blazed brightly in Lee’s mind, but he was afraid that her light was beginning to dim for others who knew her. His mother rarely mentioned her anymore, and Kylie had been too young when she disappeared to have any memories of her. He had taken up the torch to find her killer when he became a criminal profiler, but so far he had failed. His need to punish himself for this failure was intense, and it was only with an extreme effort that he